


The Evening Star (or: These Clothes Don’t Fit Us Right – B side)

by RobbieTurner



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Childhood Memories, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 20:36:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4801448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobbieTurner/pseuds/RobbieTurner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on Starsinew’s unmatchable 'These clothes don’t fit us right', this is Levi’s side of the story.  </p>
<p>Or: Levi doesn't believe in fairy tales; the endings in his life are always sad, always raw, and the taste of Erwin's kisses fades like the embers where his soldiers burn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Evening Star (or: These Clothes Don’t Fit Us Right – B side)

**Author's Note:**

> Some time ago I've read one of the best fanfics ever - These Clothes Don't Fit Us Right, and I recommend everyone to read it too. It's a tale of indelible sadness written with such humanity that I cry every time I read it. This is my attempt to pay homage to this work and tell Levi's side of story, since the original focus on Eren's point of view. I changed Hanji's pronouns to they/them, and in the end I've used two or three lines of the original fanfic's dialogue. I hope you like it.

Seven days he went without bathing.

When the stink was unbearable and his hair was shiny with oil Levi lowered himself into the water and counted until sixty-five. With his lungs burning and the water dressed in filth, he scrubbed away every kiss, every piece of Erwin that still lingered in his body.

He drained the bathtub once, twice, three times until the water was clean. He felt lighter when it was over, like his heart had gone with the dirt.

 

 

And the boys and girls of frail wings paint the sky with skilled brushes. Levi circumferences the beast like a fly and lands on the soft part on the back of its neck, the only Achilles’ heel Titans have. His blades are stiff and sure and the titan dies with someone Levi knew by name between its teeth.

Today, twenty-three of them will die.

The nameless land is soaked with rain and blood, the conquest forgotten as legions of titans begin to surround them.

He doesn't think. To think is to die. He flies and kills and buys time for the survivors. So easily they fall into the role of prey, grasping at their dignity even in the gruesome death. When soldiers of the survey corps die, they die fighting; blades piercing meat that can't be pierced, their bodies half eaten already.

It was raining too, the day he first experienced loss.

(Erwin is a piece of gold tucked away in his heart.)

 

 

He remembers feeble babies drowned like rats, lives made out of clay, an entire country built from filth.

He remembers feeling an unspeakable, angry gratitude, buried deep behind his kisses.

He remembers, because someone has to carry the dead.

Eren in passed out on his bed, dried semen on his thighs, dreaming the right kind of dream; the only mercy he gets. Levi doesn’t allow himself that. When the boy wakes up they will rut again, wounded animals that they are, and they’ll forget things beautiful and horrible for the brief moment of release. Their bodies fit loosely. They wander soulless into each other’s arms.

 

 

“…So you used to have a woman.”

Erwin smiled lazily, the smile he saved for Sunday mornings, for Levi, for the scarceness of peace. Levi traced an invisible map on his chest, choosing points where to kiss, like marking cities.

“That was before I met you.” Erwin confirmed, playing with the other’s dark hair.

“And she was good?” Levi prompted.

“Yes. She was pretty and honest. Still is, I reckon. She’s still alive.” Erwin said, looking at the man that was all but laying on his chest, cocky and regal like a cat.

“So you could have married her, filled her with children and gotten fat and rich.”

“I could have.”

Levi smiled too, a finger tracing Erwin’s nipple with the gentleness he saved for Sunday mornings, for Erwin, for that scarce domesticity.

“But you chose to die young and poor, probably in pain, and live a miserable life.”

“And fuck you in the ass.” Erwin added, still playing with Levi’s hair, still smiling.

“And fuck me in the ass.” Levi nodded. “You don’t regret it?”

Erwin took Levi’s face between his hands and answered, before kissing him:

“Not a bit.”

 

 

They count good days in the fingers of a single hand. Deaths estimated in percentage. Levi knows better: they’d come back, horses tired, men defeated, a collection of bodies and pieces of bodies in their carriages. He felt like a bad man in a fairy-tale, a bringer of ill news, distributing the fallen soldiers to their pale, shocked, angry, sobbing families. They would look at him sometimes, like they were offended by his survival. Maybe he was too. Levi is humankind’s hope but no one’s son, father, brother, husband.

Should they bleed those families dry? Let their kin die agonizing deaths for a future they could not yet see? What’s a whole future compared to a few years of imprisoned happiness? What’s the whole of humanity devoured if life could last just a day longer?

For a long time, Levi thought that Erwin was made of stone, of marble, and that was, too, his becoming. His heart like a rock he could throw away, his body only the vessel of his gear and his blades. But Erwin was made of flesh and so was Levi, and he discovered that in the best way first and then in the worst.

 

 

When his sky was dark and man-made, there was a woman who he called mother for a short time, a man who made him lethal, a boy named Farlan and a girl named Isabel.  
Levi has a thousand goodbyes stuck in his throat.

He’s been watching the flames – their bodies, their youth, his childhood, - with such resolve, drinking in the last vision of his friends that he doesn’t notice Erwin approaching. It’s strange; hours ago he was ready to kill the man. Hours ago Farlan and Isabel were alive.

“You don’t get used to it.” Erwin says, standing by his side.

“So how do you survive,” asks Levi, who knows he will, but asks anyway because the world is full of sorrows and you can never know enough (also because his hatred for Erwin was replaced by a strange curiosity) “feeling like this everytime?”

“You take their deaths with you,” Erwin replies, his body closer to Levi’s now. “You let the titans taste their blades in your own.”

They watch the fire for a while.

“We will reclaim this world, Levi.”

He looks at Erwin, at the flames in his eyes. He’s never met someone so ready to die.

Levi believes him.

 

 

He's never really identified with Eren; his own rage was cold, calculated, a storm of ice and steel. Eren’s was burning anger and liquid revenge pumping into his veins, eyes bright with fury and bared teeth. He's never really identified with Eren – until now.

It’s not love what they have, it’s necessity. Like a balm to the ghost pain of their lost limbs. Eren used to fuck Armin more often than he was fucked and Levi used to be fucked by Erwin more than he did the fucking. They don’t try to imitate what they had so it’s usually Eren on his back or on all fours. They make do with black and green and grey what was once blue and gold. It’s better than letting Eren get into fights every night, at least. It’s better than letting Eren destroy himself. It’s better than facing the long hours before dawn alone.

Levi’s mind is filled with burning pages of the books he could write about Erwin. His favourite food. The size of his shoes. The name of the first dog he had when he was a child. The day of his birth. The right kind of blue to describe his eyes (Hanji had told him – it was sapphire). The width of his smile. He didn’t ask to know most of these things but he did, like he had fallen in love. He didn’t think he could, not with such a heart, soot and rotten like his past.

“You don’t get used to it.” Levi says, not looking at Eren.

Eren blinks, but there are no tears this time. Maybe they are alike, because he can’t tell who says the next phrase.

“You get even.”

 

 

They had done it a thousand times, put on their gear and climbed on their horses, the crowd gathering around them to watch the walking corpses or returning heroes, and looking back Levi knows he wouldn’t have done anything different. Perhaps, perhaps, he would have lingered a moment longer in bed with Erwin that morning, but it was not in neither of their natures to do so. They were the wings of humanity.

Erwin spoke something that Levi didn’t hear when they were about to cross the gate.

The rain started a few hours later.

( _The boy’s head is half a nightmare, half gone, one single unseeing eye, strings of golden hair covered with blood –_  
Eren screamed, and screamed, but Levi was silent.)

 

 

The first time happened after Petra was swallowed whole by a titan.

Miracles like that happen only once, she had said, after Levi had saved her, both of them covered in titan saliva and blood from the unlucky bastard that had been eaten before. He remembers her body trembling against him, the humid softness of the Titan’s tongue under them, that pinkish cave of a mouth—

Levi was bathing later, an arm stretched outside the bathtub, a rare indulgence between his fingers. He brought the cigarette to his lips and thought, nonchalantly, of the first time since he joined the Survey Corps when death seemed certain. There was something very sentimental about the mistake he had made. So he was foolish and had a heart. These things can kill you. He liked Petra, that little talented and shy bird; he couldn’t have let her die on her first mission. It was his first mistake and he would never make one again.

(What a horrible death it must be, the slow decay in liquid fire inside the stomach of a titan.)

He got up, and when he did, his Commander came uninvited through the door.

There was a pause so discreet it could have been imagined, but other than that Erwin didn’t even flinch as he looked at his naked soldier. He too had showered, Levi noticed. His hair was still damp.

“I don’t think I need to tell you,” Erwin began, as Levi reached for a towel and began drying his hair “how utterly irresponsible were your actions today.”

“Obviously you do. Or are you to check on my junk?”

“I came here to remind you how precious you are to the future of humankind.”

Levi stops at that, facing his Commander.

“To humankind.” He repeats, the line they have been tip-toing for months becoming blurrier and blurrier. Erwin is the thought that echoes in his head when he’s not thinking of death and killing.

Erwin smiles, such tiny a curve of thin lips that it would go unnoticed to someone else.

“I wouldn’t be too happy either.”

The moment lasts a little bit, and then they become professionals again. Erwin adds:

“Don’t waste your life saving another’s, Levi. We’ve seen enough death and one soldier is not more important than the other.”

“It won’t happen again, Commander.” Levi complies, wrapping the towel around his waist and getting out of the bathtub, the skin of his feet wrinkled and wet. He walks to Erwin. His head barely reaches Erwin’s chest.

“Unless it’s you.” Levi says, in that monotone voice of his. He touches Erwin’s face carefully, like he’s never touched something so soft before. “I would save you. Even though you are a fucking pain in my ass.”

“I have never found myself in need of saving, Corporal.” He answers, and looks at Levi, patiently, curious to see how far this boldness will take him. It takes him to his lips – softly, a kiss.

It ends too soon – they don’t close their eyes.

 

 

(There was no body to be burned.)

 

 

_I’m going to break your legs_ is the closest thing to “I love you” Levi has ever said.

He kisses whole constellations between Erwin’s ribs. There’s an unbearable tenderness in those large hands, in those lingering touches. He melts under Erwin, and it hurts because he never had something so good.

It’s not his first time – neither is Erwin’s. But it feels like a novelty. As something even he, a rat from the underground, mouth full of courses and brows forever furrowed, can distinguish as beautiful. There’s a lack of beauty in this cruel world. He feels greedy, taking for himself such a great part of what’s so rare.  
Loving is such a horrible thing.

Erwin takes him on his back, with Levi’s flexible legs thrown over his shoulders. There, oh. He’s so deep and so hard in his claim, as if he’s shaping Levi for his cock and his cock alone. Their bodies fit and continue fitting during the course of a whole night.

When it’s morning and Erwin sleeps soundly with an arm thrown off the bed, Levi realises that he won’t be able to lie his way out of this one. He can’t tell himself that they are just humans doing what humans do, just two sources of warmth looking for a greater heat. So he is foolish, so he has a heart: these things that can kill you.

(Where are the glorious songs of noble deaths? When they die, his chest is empty.)

 

 

There wasn’t a body to be burned.

When he died, Erwin took with him all the kisses Levi had kissed on his skin into the belly of the beast, all the words spoken to his ears alone. He took all the beauty in the world.  
Like a curse. Like a fairy tale. Erwin died the way Petra should have, stubborn to the end, not calling for help. His death was a silent one.

Twenty-two others died in the operation to take back Wall Maria, including the other fair-haired genius. A more gruesome demise was Armin’s, as if the Titans were determined to, so thoughtfully, destroy all that was beautiful. Blood and screams everywhere – and Levi’s most meaningful goodbye muted in the midst of terror, turned into blades, turned into revenge, to iron, to hunger, to the last of his wishes.

(Of horrors known, no one greater.)

 

 

When they fuck, Eren doesn’t bother to look at him and it’s good, it’s good because he sees enough of dull, empty eyes when he looks in the mirror.  
Levi looks at the stars, at the moon, at all the dull, empty things in the world.

 

 

He overheard Armin and Eren talking the night before he lost his commander and Eren lost his childhood dreams.

And it was sweet, because they were sweet, and hopeful, and warm, and in love with each other. A collection of fairy tales: fiery water and lands of ice, sandy snowfields and the thing called the sea.

They kissed. A kiss as shy as they were and Levi remembered hearing that Eren, bloody and missing a leg, had thrown himself into the titan’s mouth to save Armin and into his own brief death. They all knew more of blood and guts and death than kisses and so Levi’s dreams were small, fit for the shores of this new world, where blood and guts and death would be sparse, rarer than kisses.

A cottage by the sea. Where his Commander could grow happy and fat, get married and have children, and remember faintly of Humanity’s Hope lying in his bed, the way that body would spread for him and him alone, and the secret words written in their skins, an extinguished language known only by them. This alphabet Levi would keep for himself and take it to his grave.

“I’ll kiss the salt from your lips,” Eren said, kissed Armin again, half-joking in his next words: “We’ll be so rich I’ll buy you all the books in the world.”

“When we get out I will write new books.”

“Do you really think the world will look like the pictures?”

Levi can hear the smile in Armin’s answer:

“I think it will look better.”

 

 

He remembers - when he first made love to Erwin he had the daft eagerness of a novice (which he almost was). He kissed like children kiss. Erwin – Erwin was skilled, as he was in anything else. Warm, attentive, generous. All the makings of a perfect husband, wasted on Levi.

Of the few wonders of this barren, confined world, the Commander was his favourite. And they were made of frankness and small smiles, and the stolen hours between night and day, of phrases said by half but understood in their entirety. When Erwin first attempted to say those three cursed words, Levi halted him saying I know. His cheeks slightly crimson, his eyes darting somewhere else. Erwin smiled when any other person would be offended, wounded even. As it always was, Levi spoke to him even in silence.

The second time, however, Levi didn’t stop him.

“I would take you,” Erwin said one day, body half-ridden by the sheets, watching as Levi carefully folded his few clothes in a neat pile. “To a cottage where we would live together.”

“Do I look like a fucking wife?” Levi answered, with no real bite behind his words.

“You are accomplished like one,” Erwin pondered, pulling him gently by the arm back into bed. “You only need to learn how to cook.”

“You hit your head harder than I thought if you think I’ll fucking cook for you.” Levi said, settling in Erwin’s lap.

The Commander’s smile didn’t waver, as if the foul-mouth of his subordinate was the precise reason why he was so enthralling.

“I will then.”

“What?”

“Cook.”

It’s almost a sigh that leaves his lips. Levi touches Erwin’s lips with a single finger, and then kisses him, frowning, before speaking:

“Don’t you get tired of talking so much bullshit?”

Erwin takes Levi’s hand in his and kisses it.

“I will take you,” he says, “to a cottage where we will live together.” And with the hand he still has, Erwin holds Levi’s face and looks at him as if he is something unmatchable. Something he would not find inside these walls or outside them. “And I will cook for us, and help you clean, and sleep every night by your side. I will say the words you dread; I will say them with my last breath.”

Levi aches. It can’t be good, to want so much.

 

 

He considers for a moment telling Hanji that this mission will be his last, but then decides against it. There’s a lack of joy in the things they do now, and Levi almost misses the way Hanji would talk excitedly about the things they wanted to learn, the hidden immensity of what is unknown.

It’s selfish, yes, but he lets Hange finds out in the battlefield.

 

 

The girl learns how to dance with him, the steps only they can master. They are lethal birds in the sky and tomorrow let their wings be covered in titan blood. Mikasa is a good pupil, focused, quiet and cold like him.

“Don’t let him give up.” Levi says when they finish. “Whatever happens, take him to that basement.”

She nods at him, with gelid understanding. He knows that only a few weeks ago she wanted to punch his teeth out, and yet there’s a strange thread of respect between them. Levi likes her, and maybe in a few years they could become friends, or the closest thing Levi has to those, like he is with Hanji. A great number of other endings, but he chose his already. And let the whole world be his inheritance for those who will be alive still.

 

 

The next day finds Humanity’s wings spread and mighty, a string of titan’s corpses still burning in their wake.

No time to mourn or celebrate. Along with the titan’s, they left bodies of their own too. Victory – this strange thing he shall never taste – is near.

_And the boys and girls of frail wings paint the sky with skilled brushes._

Not much of them left, now. Boys and girls, rarer than kisses. The group that makes it to the outskirts of Shingashima holds less than half of the original number. Twenty or so, of Humanity’s brightest.

Levi lands on a roof while Hanji takes down a titan. And then Hanji screams _look!_ and he sees the thing that is dark like nightmares, the worthy opponent.

“What the fuck is that?” he asks, sounding calm. It’s weird, being this the first time he feels curiosity since Erwin died.

“It _speaks_ , Levi,” Hanji whispers, like it’s a prayer, a votive offering before some awful vengeful god, “It’s… it’s _commanding_ the others.”

“Hanji,” Levi says, his voice matter-of-fact, “Got any spares?”

He signs his own fate with a few more phrases.

 

 

He wanted to break his legs and bring him the secrets of humanity’s fate like a courting gift. He wanted to return to the only home he would ever have.  
He wanted-

 

 

Levi leaves Hanji in command. They protested, of course, but perhaps they always knew. Levi looks at Eren one last time: don’t look back. This is the broken boy that welcomed him between his legs during undying nights. This is the broken boy that needs to survive. Levi is himself is broken, but beyond repair.

_“They took my Commander,” he says, perfect calm; eye of a storm that’s been raging for years, “So I’ll take theirs.”_

 

 

The Titan, the Ape looks at him with a glim of amusement in his eyes. Curiosity, too. Let him see, Levi thinks, the man that will kill him.

 

 

_And to erode that skin with kisses until his shoulder was shaped after your lips…_

He wonders how they’ll look dressed in old age. Erwin sleeps beside him. Levi wants to kiss every string of his commander’s yellow hair before it turns grey and after that too. Oh, maybe peace would soften him. Maybe he would find himself smiling. Maybe, he fears, that cottage and that man would make him gentler. Maybe the years would be filled with stupid happiness and their bed would always be warm. Maybe they’ll live – and die – together.

Because this is what he knows: blood and rage, fury, hunger, death. A cottage and pain rarer than kisses and his commander always with him – he can learn these things, can’t he? _Yes_ , he thinks, before closing his eyes, he can learn.

 

 

 

 


End file.
